Footsteps

Darren Brown never wanted to be like his running-obsessed father. In one way, at least, he's done just that.

He sits on the cedar deck of his rented duplex, not far from the University of Virginia, and watches the sunlight rise above the Blue Ridge Mountains on a cool October morning. He listens to the racket of birds and sips coffee from a mug adorned with a photo of his father and himself. The photo was taken 20 years earlier, when he was just a little boy. The father and son are running, side by side, along a Florida path.

Darren Brown, now 23, fingers the mug but avoids looking at the picture. He bolts the rest of the coffee, and then slips off his warmup jacket, laces his running shoes, and breaks from the house. He trots out of the cul-de-sac and turns left onto a two-lane road thick with morning traffic. He runs along the shoulder of the road, feeling his breath loosening as his body settles to the work. After a mile, he cuts onto a bike trail that delivers him to the base of a hill at the edge of the Virginia campus.

There he meets his coach, Jason Vigilante. They review the agenda: 10 half-mile repeats up a steep, winding gravel road. Then Vigilante hikes to the top of the hill and the work begins. Darren, an aspiring professional runner, knocks out the first three repeats, dead on pace. But then, on the fourth—the stage of a workout when it often happens—he flashes on the image. It appears on its own, with no effort from Darren: It's his father holding out his arms on a December morning, waiting for a hug, smiling, as if nothing were wrong, as if he'd be there later in the day when his little boy got home from school.

When Darren sees his father, he wonders, as he does each time the image appears, Why couldn't he have given a sign? Why didn't he say goodbye?

On the morning of December 14, 1992, the house in Gainesville, Florida, was in full Christmas mode. The tree was up in the living room, the lights were strung outside. Darren Brown, 7 years old, stood by the front door, wearing his backpack, waiting for Bobbi, his mother, to drive him to another day of first grade. Barry Brown, 48, stepped out of his office to give his son his daily send-off.

Other dads left the house each morning for work, but Darren's was different. Barry supported his family by selling insurance and making investments out of his home office, but what he really did was run. At Providence College during the 1960s, Barry emerged as an All-American runner and a world-class steeplechaser. In the 1970s, along with serving as the anchor and catalyst for the legendary Gainesville-based Florida Track Club, he excelled in a range of distances on the track and roads, competing in two Olympic Trials and making several national teams. During the 1980s, Barry evolved into a groundbreaking masters competitor, setting U. S. records from 8-K up to the marathon. Throughout his career, he coached, mentored, and inspired hundreds of runners, from middle-of-the-packers to Olympians.

Barry brought a ferocious dedication to his career. He trained 100 to 140 miles per week, a level he had maintained since leaving Providence. When Barry gave a motivational talk at a road race, he told the audience that running was simple: All you had to do was put on shorts and shoes and keep your appointment with yourself.

Barry never missed his twice-a-day appointment. He ran in the morning, leaving the house before Darren woke up, and again in the afternoon. Nothing interfered with that commitment. Years earlier, for instance, when she was pregnant with Darren, Bobbi collapsed one day and was taken to a hospital, where she was diagnosed with pneumonia. She called Barry, who was preparing to run. "I'll come if you really need me," he told her. Bobbi, getting the drift, told him, "That's okay, go ahead and run."

When Darren thought of his father, he pictured him lying on the living-room couch, recovering from his long run, watching television, popping M&M's, and drinking a Coke. If he wasn't too worn out, he might toss Darren a Nerf football. Darren also thought of Barry at the end of his morning run, gliding into the circular driveway in front of the house just after Darren had finished his breakfast. He loved to meet his father and run the final 50 yards with him.

Everyone, it seemed, loved to run with Barry, because he so freely shared his passion. He might meet somebody at the track at the University of Florida and bring him home for dinner. Or some man he'd run beside at a race in a distant city might show up and stay for a week. Sometimes, Darren sensed, these drop- ins bothered his mother. If so, Barry never seemed to notice. He was too busy making other runners happy.

Keith Brantly was one such runner. He trained under Barry's guidance for the 1992 Olympic Marathon Trials. Prior to the race, which took place in Columbus, Ohio, Barry told Brantly to wait until the final six miles before moving to the lead. But Brantly became impatient and started his surge at the 13-mile mark. Toward the end of the race he faded, finishing in fourth place, which meant that he just barely missed making the team that competed in Barcelona, Spain.

When Brantly returned to Gainesville following the Trials, he was still upset. He met Barry and they went for a run. Usually they talked while they ran—Barry told stories and cracked jokes—but that day they kept to themselves. Finally, about halfway through their route, Barry broke the silence. He told Brantly that he had to learn from the mistake and start focusing on the next Trials in four years. "Other people had already given me that advice," Brantly now recalls, "but coming from Barry in the middle of a hard run, the words seemed to mean more."

Such dedication, to running and to his fellow runners, came at a price. Often, Bobbi and Darren were on their own. Barry always seemed to be charging out the door that Darren waited by now, going on another run, or to the airport to catch a plane to another race. Sometimes Bobbi and Darren went along, but even then they felt left out. Darren toddled his first steps, for instance, in a hotel corridor in North Carolina. His mother caught him and made a big fuss. Barry was gone as usual, out running his race.

But for all that Barry had given to his sport, he'd never been quite fast or fortunate enough to earn a living at it—he lacked a closer's speed. To make money, he had to sit in his office, talking on the phone for hours at a time, selling insurance policies and brokering deals. And lately, Barry was always in his office working, or it seemed that way to Bobbi and Darren. His voice would rise as he talked on the phone, and when he'd finally come out of the office, his face often looked gray and stricken. But only for a moment. Pretty soon he'd be laughing and smiling again. It was like the sun breaking out from behind a rain cloud.

So on that December morning in 1992, Barry hugged his son like he usually did. He didn't say goodbye; he just told Darren to have a nice day. Then his mother bundled him into the car and they were off, Darren to school and Bobbi to work, with Barry waving and grinning in the rearview mirror. Nothing seemed different.

That afternoon, Bobbi picked Darren up at school, and as they drove home, Darren chattered excitedly about his day and about the prospect of the coming Christmas vacation. Bobbi steered into the driveway. She and Darren climbed out of the car and entered the house, where they were stopped by the overpowering smell of gas fumes. Darren looked up at his mother, who took a step toward the closed garage door. Then she stopped and stood still for a moment, as if making up her mind about something. She turned to Darren, took his hand, and led him outside and back to the car. She then rushed into the house and called 911.

Before help could arrive, Bobbi drove around the corner and left Darren at a friend's house. As he played with his neighbor, Darren heard the wail of ambulance sirens and saw police cars hurtling by with their lights flashing, but he put them out of his mind and enjoyed the unplanned time with his friend.

It was well past 11 p. m. when Bobbi returned. She came with her father. This must have something to do with Christmas, Darren thought when he saw his grandfather in the car. But nobody spoke as they headed home. Bobbi drove around the block and stopped at the foot of the driveway. She looked at Darren and held his hand. "Your father is gone," she said, and then she started to cry. In his excitement and exhaustion, Darren couldn't comprehend this strange message. But his mother was crying, so Darren started to cry, too.

He would cry only one more time over his father. That would happen four days later at the memorial service held at the Percy Beard Track at the University of Florida. A crowd of 300 people had gathered, mostly members of the running community. Barry's best friend, Marty Liquori, and others delivered eulogies, and then they all walked a symbolic farewell lap around the track. In honor of Barry, the steeple hurdles were all lined up. With Bobbi's permission, Liquori lifted Darren over the final water jump.

Watching the boy, people started to cry, so Darren cried, too.

"This is about my perfect day," Darren Brown says, smiling, shortly after he finishes his morning workout. "Get out of bed, put on a hurt, then grab some breakfast and hang out. This afternoon I'll work the medicine balls, go to the team's track practice at 3, and after that I'll run an easy five."

He moved to Charlottesville, Virginia, last September, pursuing his dreams of a major shoe-endorsement contract, national and world championship meets, and an Olympic berth: Barry, for all his success, fell short of achieving many of these glories. This morning's hill-climbing session is Darren's first hard workout of the fall. Though not as hot as Austin, which Darren left in August after graduating from the University of Texas, it's warm enough in Charlottesville to run shirtless, and his chest is slick with sweat.

He has inherited his father's hunger for the sport. He has also inherited Barry's disarming smile, his warm friendly eyes, and his clean, metronomic stride. The resemblance is so striking, and the impact of Barry's life and death so lasting, that occasionally one of the graying children of the first running boom will mistakenly call Darren by his father's name.

At times, the energy and conviction in the young runner's voice can remind an aging boomer of the passion his father once had for the sport. "In terms of setting a standard for a runner to shoot for, I can't think of anybody better than Barry," Darren says, stopping along the way to towel off. "Name me another American runner who competed at such a high level, over so long a time span, and in such a wide variety of events. He had tremendous endurance and a near-perfect sense of pace. He just couldn't find that extra gear." Darren slows down for a moment, considering the ways that he's a different—and perhaps better—runner than his father. Finally, he says, "I think I can develop that extra gear."

Thomas Joiner, PH. D., has spent the better part of his career studying the victims of suicide, and their survivors. "There is no single, one-size-fits-all way that a suicide survivor deals with the trauma," says Joiner, a psychology professor at Florida State University and author of Why People Die by Suicide. "In our talk-show-permeated society, we think that a survivor has to constantly ventilate and verbalize, but that's not right for everybody, especially for some children. Just because a kid is quiet doesn't mean that he's not processing."

Darren was one of the silent children. He didn't talk about Barry. He never cried or moped, nor did he appear to grieve. It seemed natural for Bobbi to avoid the subject of her late husband, whose disastrous investment schemes—one involving a corporate public offering in Ecuador, and another the sale of gold coins through a Swiss bank—had lost hundreds of thousands of dollars belonging to people who had trusted him. The investors included many of his friends in the running community, as well as Barry's own parents, who lost their life savings in the debacle. Bobbi felt angry, humiliated, and betrayed. Also, she points out, she essentially had felt like a single mother before that morning when her husband walked into the garage, started the engine of the blue Mercedes convertible, and breathed in the fumes.

"But I worried, naturally, about Darren," she says, sitting in the living room of her home in Bradenton, Florida. At age 53, Bobbi Norris, herself a competitive runner for more than 15 years, remains taut and fit, her skin attractively weathered by the sun. She had met Barry in Bolton Landing, New York, not far from where he had grown up and owned a second home. She was a knockout in her 20s, one of "George's Girls," a waitress at a popular lunch spot in nearby Lake George. He was a charming star athlete, recently divorced from his first wife, Lynn Rossi, with whom he'd fathered two daughters, Stacy and Candy. Bobbi served Barry a sandwich and they talked about their mutual interest in running. A relationship soon developed, and they married in 1984. Darren was born one year later.

"I thought that Darren ought to be talking about it, so I took him to a child psychologist," Bobbi goes on. "They met for a while, and then came out to the waiting room. I asked about a second appointment, but the psychologist said that wouldn't be necessary. Darren was handling it just fine."

"I'm not sure I was fine," Darren says. "How can anybody be 'fine' after his father kills himself? I had just decided, on a child's unconscious level, that I wasn't ready to deal with it. On that same level, I think that's why I avoided the sport for so long. If I didn't start running, I wouldn't have to face what happened with Barry."

Bobbi sold the house and they left Gainesville, moving south to Sarasota. Bobbi rented a two-bedroom apartment. She worked at a private school during the day and took classes at night. Darren became a latchkey kid. He learned to cook, specializing in mac and cheese, and kept the apartment straightened up. "It was hard, but there were some good times, too," he remembers. "Once a week my mom made a point of coming home early. We would stop at a Subway for sandwiches and then drive down to the beach at Siesta Key to watch the sunset."

Darren grew into a bright, quick, handsome boy, resembling his father to an almost painful degree. He was sociable, generous, and couldn't sit still—all traits straight from Barry. And like Barry, he was a natural athlete.

One day, in 1993, Bobbi and Darren were on the beach, where a kids' fun run was taking place. Darren, 8 at the time, asked his mother if he could enter, and she agreed. Untrained, stepping in cold, he won the race. More kids' track meets followed. Bobbi let him go, but only reluctantly, and always remembering.

"Most people go through cycles," Bobbi says. "You do something for a time—you run 100 miles a week—and then your enthusiasm wanes. But Barry got stuck on his passion for running. It was really the only thing that gave his life meaning." That was never more clear than in the last year of his life.

In the weeks before his suicide, Barry had not only been dealing with financial problems but also with the first serious injury of his career—degenerating disks in his back—that prevented him from running. "Even when his back pain was excruciating, when I had to lift him out of bed in the morning, he would desperately search for a way to keep running," Bobbi says. "Finally, he just couldn't run another step, and that was the one failure he couldn't deal with."

Others who knew Barry well take an opposing view. They say that the sport was the buoy that kept him afloat, not the ball and chain that dragged him under. "Running had always been a crucial and stabilizing force in Barry's life," says John L. Parker, author of the novel Once a Runner and Barry's friend and training partner with the FTC in the 1970s. "Had he been able to run, I think he eventually would have resolved his financial difficulties, or at least found a way to cope with his failure. As long as Barry could run—feel a sense of accomplishment, stimulate the endorphins, talk things out with his friends—he could weather anything."

It turned out that Bobbi's fears about her son proved groundless, at least temporarily. Darren, despite his obvious talent for the sport, held back. He competed in a few meets, got diverted into the long jump, and then let it go, immersing himself in soccer. His mother exhaled.

Working his Buscarino virtuoso guitar, Marty Liquori swings through "Take the 'A' Train" at his group's regular Monday night gig at Leonardo's 706, a jazz club in Gainesville.

During the break that follows his set, Liquori confides that he'd rather be playing more of the Gypsy jazz that he enjoys listening to, but the standards are what moves drinks.

He also acknowledges that, until recently, he mostly knew Darren Brown as a skinny tow-headed child, not as a young man with professional and Olympic hopes. Since Barry's death, Liquori had only sporadically kept up with his good friend's son. "After Bobbi and Darren left Gainesville, I gradually lost contact with them," Liquori says. He gives a laugh. "I used to watch Barry push the kid around in his stroller. Now he's starting to break Barry's PR's."

Leonardo's lies less than a mile from the University of Florida where, more than 30 years ago, the original FTC hammered: Frank Shorter, Parker, Olympians Jack Bacheler and Jeff Galloway, Byron Dyce, who was an Olympian for his native Jamaica, and Barry Brown. Liquori, who rivaled Jim Ryun as the premiere American miler of the 1960s and '70s, wasn't a member of the FTC—he competed for a rival club—but he trained with its runners regularly. "In the early '70s, for a serious runner, this part of Florida seemed like a slice of heaven," he remembers. "Every day you could train with some of the best runners, and the best guys, in the world. The rent and the food were cheap, and the winter sun was warm. We had a contest to see who could run deepest into the winter without putting on a shirt."

Nobody had much money, or spent much time cross-training, so the athletes pursued callings beyond the sport. Bacheler studied to become an entomologist. Shorter went to law school. Parker wrote fiction. Liquori prepared for a TV career, which would later make him the public face of track and road running, and started the Athletic Attic, a retail shoe business. All of this while blasting 90 miles a week, and having a blast doing it.

"We had no endorsement money from the shoe companies," says Shorter, the 1972 Olympic Marathon gold medalist. "But that led to a great sense of camaraderie. On long runs you got to have intense conversations with some very intelligent, multidimensional people. I never wore a watch on those runs. During other workouts, we would go at each other's throat. But afterward you turned it off and had a great time together. And the guy at the center of it all was Barry Brown."

Every morning at 6:30, Barry led a run that started from the parking lot beside the track on the university campus. "I went the first day I was in town, but I've never been a morning person," Liquori says. He would train later in the morning, and meet Barry and others for another workout in the afternoon.

The two men developed a close friendship. They were both voluble, funny, fast-thinking guys with Northeastern blue-collar roots who shared a competitive rage and a strong entrepreneurial streak. During their long runs together, Barry would often pitch his latest investment scheme. Liquori, a disciplined businessman, listened skeptically. But Barry unfortunately often fell prey to his own spiel.

Shorter, who now lives in Boulder, Colorado, recalls that "Barry was amazingly smart, generous, and good-hearted, but he also had this P. T. Barnum side. But unlike Barnum, he really believed in his own schemes. In the end, he was much more a victim than a perpetrator. Barry's dream was to make enough money so he could retire at 50, and then focus completely on running."

Although Gainesville remains his home, Liquori exhibits little nostalgia for what took place there years ago. In 1991, he was diagnosed with chronic lymphocytic leukemia, a life-threatening disease that remains in remission. Fulfilling his boyhood dream, he now devotes most of his time to jazz, both by performing and developing Gainesville's jazz community.

Another set rides to an end, and the musicians take a break. Forty pounds heavier than in his middle-distance prime but moving with the grace of a natural athlete, Liquori greets patrons around the room before settling at the bar. Liquori explains that he and Darren began communicating regularly last summer, when Darren decided to pursue a professional running career. He provides business and training advice, as well as a link to the father Darren barely knew. This can lead to some tricky emotional territory. Liquori is aware of the theory, for instance, that Barry's devotion to running played a role in his suicide.

"I'm aware of it, but I don't buy it, and I don't see any risk in Darren pursuing the same sport as his father," Liquori says. "Barry was an athlete. A runner. A torpedo. The rest of us eventually found something else to obsess on." He makes a gesture encompassing the room and his music. "But Barry stayed a torpedo."

He pauses while the barkeep clears some glasses. "As much as Barry and I were alike as athletes, we differed in one key respect," he continues. "What I cared about was winning. Training was what I had to endure to win. But Barry loved to train. He loved the process. The running was what made him happy. Or to put it another way, Barry was never going to be happy, or really feel like himself, apart from running. I think Darren is the same kind of athlete—he loves the process, the running. In fact, by becoming a runner, he's learning what his father was all about."

Liquori sips his club soda. "Who knows if his dreams will come true?" he says. "Why shouldn't the kid try to find out?"

Navigating by a combination of chance, choice, and, perhaps, destiny, Darren Brown set out on his journey of discovery. It started one day in 1995, at the Tampa airport, when his mother ran into Dave Norris, an accomplished runner who used to run with Bobbi and Barry during the summer near Lake George. Norris was visiting Florida on business; at the time he was also separated from his wife. Bobbi and Dave met for dinner, and later, after Dave's divorce, a relationship developed that eventually led to the two marrying in 2000. The couple moved with Darren to Southern California, and then to Houston, where Darren, now a teenager, enrolled at Klein High School.

There he blossomed into a happy, popular, well-adjusted honors student and standout soccer player. In the summer after his freshman year, he suffered an ankle injury. The following autumn, to rehab and regain fitness, he ran on the cross-country team. His performance was pedestrian, and Bobbi expected him to lose interest in running, as he had earlier. But instead, some tumbler clicked inside of Darren.

"He came to Dave and me one day and said that he wanted to run," Bobbi recalls. "He said he wanted to be good at this."

Bobbi and Dave were pleased that Darren had committed to achieving a goal, but they also worried. Scenes from Barry's obsession remained seared in Bobbi's memory. By choosing the same powerfully addictive sport as his father, it seemed possible that Darren might follow a path similar to his father's. Joiner, the psychology professor, says biological offspring of suicide victims are at a greater risk of suicide than the general population.

Eventually, Bobbi and Dave concluded that enough time had passed since Barry's death, and that Darren had sufficiently matured, for the benefits of running to outweigh the risks. Destiny also played a role: There was no mistaking Darren's hunger to run, or the likelihood that, with some applied training, his genetic gift for the sport would quickly show. "By then I had gotten some perspective," Bobbi says. "I realized that running didn't have to develop into an obsession. If Dave and I were vigilant, Darren didn't have to repeat Barry's mistakes."

Dave, who owns a 2:33:36 PR for the marathon, assisted the Klein track coach with Darren's training. They designed a long-range plan that encouraged Darren to improve incrementally. Dave made sure that Darren maintained his GPA, cross-trained, and pursued interests beyond running. The regimen worked—aided by Dave's protective yet prodding coaching. By his senior year, Darren had logged times that drew interest from several Division I track programs, including Oregon and Texas. Ultimately, he chose Providence, Barry's alma mater.

Yet, for all his high school success, Darren failed to meet one goal: to compete at a Texas state championship meet. "In Texas, if you don't finish in the top two at districts, you don't move on to the regionals, no matter how fast your time," Darren says. His best chance came in 2003, during the outdoor season of his senior year. "At our district qualifier, I ran a 1:53.19 for the 800. It was a PR and one of the fastest times that season." Problem was, two other runners ran faster times in the same race.

After the 800, Darren sat dejectedly by the track. In another hour he was scheduled to run the 1600. Dave came down from the stands to sit with him.

"How do you feel?" Dave asked in a gentle tone. "Crappy."

Dave nodded. "You just ran a 1:53 PR," he pointed out in the same quiet voice. "Is that a crappy race?"

"No, sir."

"You're going to Providence on a scholarship. Is that crappy?" "No, sir."

"All right then. Go ahead and be upset for a few more minutes. Then stand up, brush yourself off, and go run another PR."

It was insightful, fatherly advice, the kind that Barry Brown had once routinely provided Keith Brantly and many other runners. Now, at a crucial moment in his son's career, Barry wasn't around. Darren can never forget that. "By every measure that means anything, I consider Dave to be my father," Darren says. "That's why I call Barry, Barry."

But at Providence, there was no avoiding Barry. Every time Darren went into the locker room, he saw his father's photo, displayed beside the school's other All-Americans. Ray Treacy, the team's coach, had been a friend of Barry's and steered Darren into the steeplechase, his father's event. Darren began to study Barry's remarkably long, versatile, and accomplished running career. The more that he learned about Barry as an athlete, his admiration grew—along with his anger. "Now that I was older, and a runner myself, I was able to understand some of the pain Barry must have felt, and the pressure he was under," Darren says. "But no matter how often I added it all up, the bottom line always came out the same. He abandoned me and my mother."

The jolting yo-yo ride between respect and resentment intensified when Treacy one day pointed out to Darren that there had never been an American father-son duo in which each ran a sub-four- minute mile. The Browns had a shot at becoming the first such team—Barry had clocked a 3:58.86 on a Florida track in 1973 with Marty Liquori as his rabbit—but only if Darren could accept a challenge that would dramatically tax his emotions, his body, and ultimately his will to find that elusive extra gear.

In the fall of 2005, after two years at Providence, Darren transferred to Texas where Jason Vigilante, then an assistant coach, was building one of the best distance programs in the nation. Shortly after arriving in Austin, Darren developed an allergic disorder of his vocal cords that hampered his breathing during the steeplechase and other longer events. Shifting his focus to the middle distances, he narrowed his personal goals to the pursuit of the sub-four-minute mile.

Fifty-five years after Roger Bannister first broke the barrier, the four-minute mile retains its mythic power. Now, by circumstance and perhaps by fate, Darren was training to join a select crowd, one that included a familiar yet distant member.

As he worked toward his goal, Darren found it easier to separate and crystallize his feelings. The rich legacy that Barry had left as an athlete nearly matched the shadow he had cast as a parent. While Darren's anger toward his absent father remained undiminished, he was learning to revere the runner who never missed his appointment with himself. "Throughout his career, Barry kept meticulous training logs, which I now own," Darren says. "They're amazing to read. There are countless daily entries showing 17 miles in the morning, then eight in the afternoon. And they were high-quality miles, which he mostly covered on thin-soled racing shoes. No wonder his back blew out. But the point is, Barry was tough. All those FTC guys down in Gainesville were tough. That's the memory I wanted to honor."

As always, however, Darren faced some formidable competition: Sam Bair III at the University of Pittsburgh, and Joaquin Chapa and Matt Centrowitz Jr., who both ran for the University of Oregon, also hoped to join their fathers in breaking four minutes for the mile. Rudy Chapa and Matt Centrowitz, Joaquin's and Matt's respective dads, had been outstanding Oregon athletes in the 1970s, while Sam's father, Sam Bair Jr., ran with the FTC in Gainesville alongside Barry Brown.

By the beginning of 2007, Darren had whittled his PR to 4:02. He tried to nail the sub-four at an indoor meet at the University of Arkansas, but his winning time was 4:04. He drew no closer during the outdoor season. Over the summer he had to squeeze his training in while serving an internship as a sales representative with a Texas medical-equipment company. He put in a relatively sluggish '07 cross-country season and didn't compete indoors the following winter.

That left him one final collegiate track season, the spring of '08, to make the mark. He came up just short at an early-season meet in Boston, running 4:01. Sam Bair III ran a 4:00 flat at another meet on the same day. By the thinnest of margins, the team of Barry and Darren Brown was alive. But the mile is seldom run during a collegiate track season, and Darren's last chance as an undergraduate would come at the Clyde Littlefield Texas Relays on April 5 at Mike A. Myers Stadium in Austin. Darren's Longhorn teammate Leo Manzano (who would later make the 2008 U. S. Olympic team) was also in the race, aiming to break the stadium record. Bobbi and Dave flew from Florida to watch.

When he awoke the day of the mile, Darren poured himself a cup of coffee using the mug with the photo of himself as a boy running side by side with Barry. Later that morning, he went to his favorite breakfast spot and ordered the Paris, Texas Platter—migas and French toast. He leafed through an inspirational book that a friend had given him. The next several hours passed quickly. At the track he expected Vigilante to give him a pre-race pep talk, as the coach was known to do. On this day, Vigilante decided not to bother Darren. "I didn't have to say anything to him," the coach recalls. "I saw how loose he looked, he wasn't carrying any tension in his shoulders. I just told him, 'Go compete.'"

It was a perfect day to run—bright sunshine, temperatures in the low 70s, a light breeze. The stands were filled to capacity. The starting gun cracked and Darren settled in the back of a lead pack that included Manzano and the 1500-meter All-American Vincent Rono. The pack went through the first two laps in 59 and 60 seconds respectively; Darren passed the three-quarter mark at 3:02. He needed to come in under 58 seconds on the fourth lap to nail it.

He rounded the turn in front of the stands and entered the final 100 meters. He glanced up at the scoreboard timer and saw 3:44. He had 15 seconds to kick it home. Manzano and Emmanuel Bor from the University of Alabama were belting it out in front of him. The announcer was shrieking, and the crowd noise swelled like the beat of an enormous bass drum. As quickly as the hours had gone by before the race, the seconds and meters passed slowly now. Darren felt caught in a sweaty nightmare; he needed to be someplace but his limbs were encased in cement and he couldn't move.

Ahead of him, Manzano crossed the line in 3:56.98, breaking the stadium record, but Darren still wasn't home. The numbers on the scoreboard were not yet showing 4. Darren bore down, entering that blind chute of pain and effort where it all went away, the crowd roaring, the announcer screaming. Even Barry was fading, his arms outstretched, as if finally saying goodbye.

Darren hit the line in third place. He looked up and saw that the time flashed next to third place began with the numeral three: 3:59.99. The mark was his by a sliver. He fell to his knees, and then on his back, spread-eagled, looking up at the sky. Then Manzano was lifting him up and shouting, and Vigilante ran at a dead sprint across the infield to tackle him. An uncertain buzz carried through the crowd as the fans wondered about the fuss over the third-place finisher, who had logged an impressive but not startling time. But then the announcer explained Darren's achievement, and a fresh bass-roar lifted from the stands.

Vigilante told Manzano and Darren to take a long, slow cooldown jog in the streets around the stadium. But first Darren embraced Bobbi and Dave. They held onto each other for a long time. Then Darren let go of his mother, and of the man who loved him like a father, and trotted slowly out of the stadium and into the Austin twilight.

On the Tuesday morning after his gig at Leonardo's, Marty Liquori drives to the university track in Gainesville. It's bright but cold, and a little early in the day for a jazz man. Liquori hunches his shoulders and squints as he climbs out of his car and walks to the edge of the all-weather track.

"It's all different now, of course," he says, gesturing to the giant bulk of the basketball arena on one side of the track and the grandstand jutting on the other. "None of that was here back in our day." He gives an apologetic shrug. "It's been a while since I made it over to campus."

Liquori walks slowly along the track with his hands in his pockets. "This is where Barry ran his first sub-four," he says. "Right here at an all-comers meet one night. We set it up for him; I was one of the rabbits. I remember that there was a citizen on the track that evening, some guy jogging through the race, and despite this huge production, this big sense of urgency, this guy wouldn't move off the inside lane. Barry had to run around him. The guy said the track belonged to him as much as it did to us. Pissed me off, but Barry just laughed, he was so happy afterward."

Liquori's smile fades. "The way that Darren remembers it, when he was a kid, Barry was never around," he says. "Well, I can't say he's wrong, but everybody sees the past through their own lens. Darren came along after Barry had had two daughters. The way I remember it, that boy meant the world to him."

He pauses, choosing his words carefully. "Barry was a runner; that's what he did," Liquori says. "I don't know if any man would say that he thinks his father spent enough time with him."

Shivering, he turns back toward his car. "You know, Darren could never imagine this," Liquori says, "but it doesn't really matter to me that he grew up to be a runner. I would have felt just as proud to discover that he was making an honest name for himself in business or teaching or in any other calling. Darren is the child of our old friend. We couldn't help Barry, but maybe, in some small way, we can help his son."

Unlike the commotion surrounding his first sub-four mile, Darren Brown's second one drew virtually no notice. It came in a race last August in Dublin, Ireland, in which he finished a middling seventh. Still, he was elated. He clocked 3:58.47 and bettered Barry's PR. Finally, he had beaten his father.

Darren recalls that race as he walks the groomed hills of Panorama Farms, an 850- acre spread a few miles outside of Charlottesville, whose fields form the University of Virginia's cross-country venue. The sun feels light and warm. A hawk hunts overhead.

Last August, Jason Vigilante accepted an offer to head the track and cross-country program here at UVA, and invited Darren to join him as a volunteer assistant coach. In return, Vigilante would supervise his training. Darren was torn. He liked Austin and the teammates and friends he had there. Plus, the nation and the world were glutted with first-rate middle-distance runners. His resume, while solid—he was twice an NCAA indoor All- American—showed that he was only the fourth best 1500-meter runner at Texas. Last June, 42 runners qualified by time to compete in the 1500 meters at the U. S. Olympic Trials; Darren was number 43 on the list. Moreover, he had options. The medical-equipment firm he'd interned with the previous summer had offered him a full-time job at a generous starting salary. If he tried to make it as a professional runner, by contrast, he likely faced years of starving-artist scuffling.

The decision was complicated by the fact that Barry Brown faced similar dilemmas during his career. "With his intelligence, drive, and charisma, Barry could have been a great success in business," Dave Norris says. "But he would never commit to a full-time job. It would have interfered with running."

Despite this family history—or perhaps because of it—Darren decided to take a shot at professional running. He spent last fall training in Charlottesville, before moving back to Austin in the winter to work with his former Texas teammates. "My whole career, from high school through college, I've never been the number-one runner," he says. "But year by year, I keep improving. I end up beating guys who beat me on the previous level. I'm just crazy enough to believe that the same thing can happen on the professional level."

Darren's face darkens, and the ease with which he began his walk fades. The image of Barry, no less haunting for being familiar, seems to have fallen in step beside him: the exemplary runner who never missed an appointment with himself; the heartbreaking father who saved his best self for his friends. Why couldn't he have given a sign? Why didn't he say goodbye?

"I don't know if I'll ever be completely at peace with what happened with Barry," Darren says, "and I don't know if I should be at peace with it. But I do know one thing: I love and value my life, and I would never, ever, put the people I love through the anguish that Barry brought on us."

Darren has learned to channel his anguish, paradoxically, through the very sport in which his father lost himself. If he runs deep enough into Barry's shadow, Darren senses, he might find the light.

"I love running so much, but at the same time I'm realistic," he says. "If I can't make it as a pro, then I'll go into coaching or business. But whatever I do, I'll always run. My goal is to beat all of Barry's PRs, at every distance, in both the open and masters divisions. If I do that—if I'm running a 2:15 marathon at age 407mdash;that will mean, first of all, that I'm a good runner, period. And second, it will mean that I'm a better runner than Barry."

He goes quiet for a few strides. "You see, I want to become a better runner than my father," Darren Brown says, "but I'm determined to become a better man."